Five Tips to Improve your Web Analysis

“5 Tips to Improve your Web Analysis”

Web Analytics is no longer solely about tracking. It’s about analysing the data collected from your website and finding its value in order to optimise your site and help you to drive your business.

Data quality. Wrong data leads to wrong decisions, that’s a fact. Even if you don’t have all the data to justly affect your decision making, all it takes is a minimal amount of data to ensure your decisions aren’t biased, and that it’s relevant and reliable. Thus helping your decision making process by being driven by good insights.

Data is neutral. It’s not good or bad, it’s just a number, a metric or a passive medium. It requires context to be interpreted: time, scope, external factors (such as weather, holidays or days of the week), internal factors (such as used coupon codes or campaign costs) and where possible, historical data. If you don’t have enough context – ask for it!

Data is concept based. Visitors are linked to cookies placed in a browser. A session is a limited time lapse during which your visitor is engaged in an activity on your website. A page view is a page in which the tracking code is setup on. Think of it like colours; green is green because you learnt that during your childhood. However when asking someone who’s colorblind, they will probably tell you that the same green you see is actually brown or red in their eyes. It’s the same when you’re speaking to a marketing team or an IT person – you have to adjust your message and terminology in order to increase the comprehensibility of your information, thereby creating valuable partnerships with your co-workers and maximising understandings between different departments.

Ask the right questions. Was last week a good week? Honestly, I don’t know. It could be that it was better than it used to be. But the right question should be about your expectations regarding online sales. If the average sales generated on your site per week is €1,000 and you only aimed for €100, chances are you’re underestimating your site’s capabilities. And if your goal wasn’t to generate leads, maybe your website isn’t built optimally.

Continue to learn and adapt. Your analysis has to make a conclusion. It shouldn’t be personal, it’s not about the competencies of the person in charge of creating good campaigns – the campaigns were created, launched and are now finished. It’s done. So you have to answer at least one question, “what is the next step?”. You should focus on data driven decisions and stop the HIPPO (acronym for the “Highest Paid Person’s Opinion”) system.